Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

Emily Hamilton

I was first introduced to Jane Jacobs while working as an intern in the Planning Department of my hometown in Colorado. Her work enlightened me to the power of market forces to benefit all city dwellers without government intervention. Since then, I have become fascinated by the urban emergent order that creates our cities.

I graduated with a Masters in economics from George Mason University in 2010 after finishing my undergraduate degree at Goucher College in 2008. While at GMU, I worked as a Research Associate at the university’s Mercatus Center. After a brief time working elsewhere, I returned to the Mercatus Center to write for Neighborhood Effects about state and local policy issues.

Contact me at [email protected]

Meetup this Saturday

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This weekend Anthony Ling who writes the blog Rendering Freedom (and has previously written here) will be in DC. Stephen Smith will also be in town, and we're planning a meetup on Saturday. Anthony is an architect in São Paolo. He writes about architecture, economics, and urbanism, and I'm excited … [Read more...]

Campaign season is over links

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Stephen had great twitter coverage of urbanist election issues last night, but here are a few more links to significant outcomes: 1. Washington state and my home state of Colorado voted to legalize marijuana possession, private use, and in Colorado limited production. Drug policy liberalization … [Read more...]

Fields of Dreams in Tysons Corner

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Earlier this week Cap'n Transit wrote about Tysons Corner in the context of the Silver Line TIFIA loan application and Tysons' Smart Growth redevelopment. This development plan is something I am quite familiar with as it was the subject of my MA thesis, and his post brought to mind some of the weird … [Read more...]

A Moral Case for More Immigration

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This is a post outside of the typical urbanist issues we write about here, but one that I think is very important to cities. At Forbes, Adam Ozimek writes that economics bloggers are failing to make the case for the importance of permitting increased high-skilled immigration: I think it is … [Read more...]

From the experts on charter cities

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After my post on charter cities, I received some interesting feedback from Michael Strong, CEO of MGK Group, the company investing in Honduras' charter cities and Brandon Fuller, a Research Scholar at NYU's Urbanization Project. The Urbanization Project is headed by Paul Romer who is no longer … [Read more...]

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